Thread: How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

The Finns' declaration of intent to join NATO as soon as possible once again makes Putin look like a bloody amateur strategist who has hopelessly miscalculated. With the invasion of Ukraine, he achieved exactly the opposite of what he allegedly wanted: NATO is more present than ever on his doorstep.

^ Yup - in a nutshell.

11 MIN READ

Is Putin Sick – Or Are We Meant to Think He Is?


An oligarch close to the Kremlin was recorded on a tape saying the president is ‘very ill with blood cancer.’ Is this true, idle speculation or disinformation designed to make an erratic and paranoid dictator vulnerable?

Is Vladimir Putin sick or even dying?


The tabloid press, bolstered by a sudden efflorescence of Twitter diagnosticians, certainly seems to think so. Since his Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine got underway, the 69-year-old Russian president’s deteriorating health has been a subject of frenzied speculation — speculation that press secretary Dmitry Peskov has downplayed, citing Putin’s “excellent” health.


Boris Karpichkov, a KGB defector to Britain (and formerly an officer of the Second Chief Directorate, specializing in counterintelligence) thinks his fellow sexagenarian ex-spy suffers from Parkinson’s disease, along with “numerous” other maladies including dementia. “He is — or at least acts — insane and obsessed by paranoia ideas,” Karpichkov told Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, comparing Putin in this respect to Stalin, who was the victim of at least one stroke.

MORE Is Putin Sick – Or Are We Meant to Think He Is? - New Lines Magazine

Originally Posted by misskit

11 MIN READ

Is Putin Sick

Oh yes.

Grab a coffee and read how the murderous, thieving dictator subjugated Russia.

On December 20, 1999, Vladimir Putin addressed senior officials of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) at its Lubyanka headquarters near Moscow’s Red Square. The recently appointed 47-year-old prime minister, who had held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the FSB, was visiting to mark the holiday honoring the Russian security services. “The task of infiltrating the highest level of government is accomplished,” Putin quipped.

His former colleagues chuckled. But the joke was on Russia.

Putin became interim president less than two weeks later. From the start of his rule, he has worked to strengthen the state to counteract the chaos of post-Soviet capitalism and unsteady democratization. To achieve that end, he saw it necessary to elevate the country’s security services and put former security officials in charge of critical government organs.

In recent years, however, Putin’s approach has changed. More and more, bureaucracy has displaced the high-profile personalities that previously dominated. And as the Russian president has come to rely on these bureaucratic institutions to further his consolidation of control, their power has grown relative to other organs of the state. But it was not until February, when Putin gave the orders first to recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and then, a few days later, to send Russian troops into Ukraine, that the complete takeover by the new security apparatus became apparent.

In the early days of the war, most branches of the Russian state seemed blindsided by Putin’s determination to invade, and some prominent officials even seemed to question the wisdom of the decision, however timidly. But in the weeks since, government and society alike have lined up behind the Kremlin. Dissent is now a crime, and individuals who once held decision-making power—even if circumscribed—have found themselves hostages of institutions whose single-minded purpose is security and control. What has happened is, in effect, an FSB-on-FSB coup: Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now a faceless security bureaucracy has become the state, with Putin sitting on top.

The modern FSB traces its beginnings to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, also known as the Cheka, hunted down enemies of the new Soviet state under the fierce leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its subsequent iterations, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Ministry of State Security (MGB), evolved under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s rule and were led most notoriously by Genrikh Yagoda in the 1930s and Lavrenty Beria in the 1940s and 1950s. The KGB became the Soviet Union’s primary security agency in 1954 under Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor. Over the following decade, Khrushchev expanded the Communist Party’s oversight of the Soviet state’s institutions of control, limiting their influence. But after Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Yuri Andropov, the longtime head of the KGB, reclaimed the organization’s lost authority, bringing the security service to the height of its power in the 1970s.

Andropov went on to lead the Soviet Union as general secretary of the Communist Party from 1982 to 1984. He was merciless in imposing ideological control. Any “diversion”—such as covert disagreement with Soviet politics—was grounds for prosecution. Some dissenters were imprisoned or placed in psychiatric wards for “retraining,” while others were forced to emigrate. Living in Moscow at the time, I remember police raids to catch indolent citizens and plain-clothes KGB officers—operating like Orwellian “thought police”—surreptitiously roaming city streets, detaining people suspected of skipping work or having too much leisure time. It was an atmosphere of total control, with Andropov’s KGB fully in charge.

By the late 1980s, reforms introduced by Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the grip of the security forces. Perestroika was supposed to renew the Soviet Union—some scholars even allege Andropov had a hand in the program—but it ended up threatening the survival of the regime. The last Soviet leader turned against his KGB masters, exposing the crimes of Stalinism and proceeding with an opening to the West. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe left Moscow’s sphere of influence, the KGB turned on Gorbachev, two years later launching a failed coup that hastened the Soviet collapse.

The security apparatus was humiliated—but it was not disbanded. Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, considered communism, not the KGB, to be the greater evil. He thought that simply changing the name of the KGB to the FSB would change the organization, too, allowing it to become more benevolent and less controlling. This was wishful thinking. Russia’s security services trace their origins all the way back to Ivan the Terrible’s brutal bodyguard corps, the oprichniki, in the sixteenth century and Peter the Great’s Secret Chancellery in the eighteenth century. Yeltsin’s attempt at reform could not permanently suppress a system with such deep historical roots any more than Khrushchev’s could four decades earlier.

Russia used to be a state dominated by security forces, but now the security bureaucracy has become the state.

In fact, KGB officers were relatively well equipped to endure the collapse of communism and the transition to capitalism. To the security services, the Soviet-era call for a classless society of proletarians had always been merely a slogan; ideology was a tool for controlling the public and strengthening the hand of the state. Former members applied that pragmatic approach as they rose to elite positions in post-Soviet Russia. As Leonid Shebarshin, a former high-level KGB operative, has explained, it was only natural that those who trained under Andropov for a secret war against external and internal enemies—NATO, the CIA, dissidents, and political opposition—should become the new Russian bourgeoisie.

They could handle irregular working hours, succeed in hostile environments, and use interrogation and manipulation tactics when called for. They squeezed every last drop of labor out of their employees and subordinates.

One of their number, Putin, was himself lauded as a pragmatist by Western diplomats after he rose from obscurity to become president of Russia in 2000. Even then, he made no secret of his intention to establish Andropov-style absolute authority, quickly moving to limit the power of the capitalist barons who had flourished in the 1990s under Yeltsin’s frenzied presidency. In Putin’s mind, an independent oligarchy in control of strategic industries, such as oil and gas, threatened the stability of the state. He ensured that business decisions relevant to the national interest were made instead by a handful of trusted people—the so-called siloviki, or affiliates of the state’s military and security agencies. These individuals effectively became managers or guardians of state-controlled assets. Many were from Putin’s native Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) and most had served alongside him in the KGB. On the corporate side, their ranks include Igor Sechin (Rosneft), Sergey Chemezov (Rostec), and Alexey Miller (Gazprom), while matters of state protection are handled by Nikolai Patrushev (secretary of the Security Council), Alexander Bortnikov (director of the FSB), Sergei Naryshkin (director of the Foreign Intelligence Service), and Alexander Bastrykin (head of the Investigative Committee), among others.

Putin has been convinced that strengthening the state’s “extraordinary organs” would prevent upheaval of the kind that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Putting former KGB operatives in charge seemed to offer some economic and political stability. In an effort to maintain that stability, Putin acted in 2020 to extend his presidency, proposing constitutional amendments to circumvent the term limits that would remove him from office in 2024.

Since their ratification, the constitutional changes have given the state broad latitude to address problems ranging from COVID-19 to mass protests in Belarus to Russian opposition lawyer Alexei Navalny’s return to Moscow. As was the case in the Andropov era, all matters are now run through central regulatory bodies—federal organizations that oversee everything from taxation to science (the word nadzor, meaning “supervision,” in many of their Russian names makes them easy to recognize). Criminal prosecutions are an increasingly common tactic used against Russian citizens who complain about abuses of power, request better services, or express support for Navalny, who himself was convicted based on false accusations of fraud and other supposed crimes. A punitive apparatus of control has tightened its grip, led by the technocratic Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, a former tax official, and an assortment of midlevel managers inside the regime bureaucracy.

Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, and subsequently to launch a “special military operation” to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, followed a similar pattern of punishment for political deviation: he sought to penalize an entire country for what he deemed its “anti-Russian” choice to align with the West. But within Russia, the events leading up to and following the invasion also marked the completion of a political shift that has been years in the making. They exposed the waning power of the siloviki who dominated the early Putin era—and their replacement by a faceless security-and-control bureaucracy.

On February 21, during a nationally broadcast Security Council session, the president’s closest confidants seemed completely in the dark as to what the Donetsk and Luhansk recognition would entail. Naryshkin, of the Foreign Intelligence Service, stumbled over his words as Putin demanded an affirmation of support for the decision. By the end of this exchange, Naryshkin appeared to be trembling with fear. Even Patrushev, a hardcore conservative Chekist, wanted to inform the United States of Russia’s plans to send troops to Ukraine—a suggestion that went unanswered.

For a decision as consequential as the invasion of a neighboring country, it is remarkable how many organs of the state were out of the loop. Economic institutions were caught by surprise—when Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Russian central bank, tried to resign in early March, she was told to just buckle up and deal with the economic fallout. The military didn’t seem to be aware of the entire plan either, and spent months moving tens of thousands of troops around the border without knowing whether they would be asked to attack.

Putin’s clandestine operation was even hidden from other clandestine operatives. Leaders of the FSB department responsible for providing the Kremlin with intelligence about Ukraine’s political situation, for instance, didn’t fully believe that an invasion would happen. Many analysts had confidently argued it would be against Russia’s national interests. Comfortable in the assumption that a large-scale attack was off the table, officials kept feeding Putin the story he wanted to hear: Ukrainians were Slavic brothers ready to be liberated from Nazi-collaborating, Western-controlled stooges in Kyiv. A source in the Kremlin told me that many officials now envision a disaster akin to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which ended in a disgraceful withdrawal and helped precipitate the dissolution of the Soviet empire. But in a government that has become increasingly technocratic, institutionalized, and impersonal, such opinions are no longer permissible.

As the conflict continues into its third month and evidence of war crimes mounts, most officials and politicians continue to back Putin.

Big business is largely silent. Economic elites, cut off from the West, have rallied around the flag. Even though some may be grumbling in private, very few are vocal in public. Rare exceptions include the billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska, who has repeatedly called for peace; the former Putin associate Anatoly Chubais, known for leading Russia’s privatization under Yeltsin, who has fled to Turkey; the oligarch and former Chelsea soccer club owner, Roman Abramovich, who has tried to facilitate a negotiated settlement; and the entrepreneur Oleg Tinkov, who was forced to sell his shares in his hugely successful online bank, Tinkoff, for kopeks after speaking out against the “operation.”

Putin has never made a secret of his intention to establish absolute authority.

The rest of Russia’s 145 million citizens—except for those tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands who have fled abroad—are similarly falling in line. Having lost access to foreign flights, brands, and payment systems, most are forced to accept that their lives are tethered to the Kremlin. In a sharp departure from the early days of the Ukrainian operation, when public shock was palpable and people took to the streets expressing antiwar sentiment, polling shows that around 80 percent now support the war. The actual number is likely lower—when the state exercises total control, people give the answers that the regime wants. Still, my own conversations with relatives and friends across Russia confirm that speaking against the war is increasingly unpopular. An acquaintance in the resort town of Kislovodsk in the Northern Caucasus, for instance, insisted that Putin needs to complete “the mission of ‘de-Nazification,’ take care of the Donbas, and show Americans not to mess with Russia.”

As the shock wears off, fear has taken its place. In a televised address in mid-March, Putin insisted that Western countries “will try to bet on the so-called fifth column, on national traitors,” implying that all opponents of his “operation” are the unpatriotic enemies. The government’s security branches had previously announced a new law: spreading “fake information,” or any narrative that contradicts the Ministry of Defense’s official story, is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Independent media outlets were blocked or disbanded, including the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, liberal radio Ekho Moskvy, and Dozhd TV, all of which regularly criticized the government until two months ago. The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and other foreign media packed up and left the country. Since the end of February, more than 16,000 people have been detained, including 400 teenagers. People have been arrested for just being near a protest. For one Muscovite, merely showing up at Red Square holding a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace was enough to warrant detention.

In this atmosphere of complete repression, political figures who once seemed to offer alternative ideas now echo Putin’s uncompromising words. Former President Dmitry Medvedev has insisted that criticism of the operation amounts to treason. Even Naryshkin, a skeptic in February, has found his war footing and now faithfully parrots the government line. People no longer speak with their own voices; the shadow of Putinist Chekism now covers the entire country.

The journalist and writer Masha Gessen once dubbed Putin “the man without a face.” Today, however, his is the only face, sitting atop an anonymous security bureaucracy that does his bidding. Another coup, either in the Kremlin corridors or on the streets of Moscow, is not likely. The only group that could conceivably unseat the president is the FSB, which is still technically run by nationalist siloviki who understand that some foreign policy flexibility is necessary for internal development. But such officials are no longer the FSB’s future. The indistinct body of security technocrats now in charge is obsessed with total control, no matter the national or international consequences.

The last time the Kremlin built such an all-controlling state, under Andropov’s leadership in the early 1980s, it unraveled when the security forces relaxed their grip and allowed reform. Putin knows that story well and is unlikely to risk the same outcome. And even without him, the system he built would remain in place, sustained by the new security cohort—unless a 1980s Afghanistan-style debacle in Ukraine destroys it all. With this bureaucracy holding tight to power, Moscow’s foreign adventurism might abate. But as long as the structure holds steady, Russia will remain oppressed, isolated, and unfree.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-05-10/coup-kremlin

Originally Posted by misskit

11 MIN READ
Is Putin Sick – Or Are We Meant to Think He Is?

Putler was sick from the beginning. Russian history somehow "demands" that you have to kill your own people in order to make it into their history books.

Russian apartment bombings - Wikipedia

Originally Posted by misskit

Is Vladimir Putin sick or even dying?

The first would be good, the latter even better

double

Originally Posted by HermantheGerman

makes Putin look like a bloody amateur strategist who has hopelessly miscalculated.

Haven't been holding my breath, but I reckon that you finally got something right here.

Congratulations

Allegedly:
Medvedev commented on G7 non-recognition of changes in Ukraine’s borders

14 hours ago

MOSCOW, May 14.

"Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev reacted to the statement of the G7 foreign ministers following a three-day meeting on non-recognition of changes in Ukraine’s borders.

“Changing the borders of Ukraine is not recognized. Let’s put it mildly: our country does not care about the non-recognition of new borders by the G7, the true will of the people living there is important,” he wrote in his Telegram channel

Medvedev did not rule out a major logistical crisis due to sanctions

He urged not to forget the Kosovo precedent.

In his opinion, the countries of the association are waging a covert war with Russia and are not dealing with problems in the field of energy and food.

“Efforts are being stepped up to reduce dependence on Russian energy sources, including the phase-out of coal and oil. This means that the robbery of the citizens of the G7 will continue to support the corrupt regime in Ukraine, the very existence of which is not known to all the inhabitants of these countries,” Medvedev stressed.

In addition, the politician accused the West of interfering in China’s affairs with calls not to help Russia circumvent sanctions.

Medvedev said that the West does not notice the revival of neo-Nazism in Ukraine

Also, commenting on the intentions of the G7 countries to continue sanctions pressure on Russia, Medvedev joked that Moscow was expecting offers of material assistance for the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine.

He also ironically added that the Sevens forgot to mention the inevitable use of strategic nuclear forces by Russia in the conflict and the possible executions of Ukrainian nationalists on the Execution Ground of Red Square through quartering.

Russia launched a special operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal “the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years.” For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for “bloody crimes against civilians” in Donbass.

According to the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces strike only at the military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops, and as of March 25, they completed the main tasks of the first stage – they significantly reduced the combat potential of Ukraine. The main goal in the Russian military department was called the liberation of Donbass.

Medvedev: Sanctions will create a new security architecture in the world."

Medvedev commented on G7 non-recognition of changes in Ukraine's borders

So basically this Puffy stooge reckons Russia can invade who it likes and redraw its borders at will.

Let's hope he gets cancer too.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

invade who it likes and redraw its borders at will.

You missed the, "He urged not to forget the Kosovo precedent", reference, you may be alarmed that, historically, it was others who initiated such modifications.

A search for Kosovo may suggest you need to eat some:

Originally Posted by OhOh

You missed the, "He urged not to forget the Kosovo precedent", reference, you may be alarmed that, historically, it was others who initiated such modifications.

Once again, you prove to be a fucking imbecile.

Why Ukraine war has no winners

May 14, 2022 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Russia expects grain harvest of 130 million tonnes of grain, including 87 million tonnes of wheat – “an all-time high in Russian history,” says President Vladimir Putin, Moscow, May 12, 2022

"The war in Ukraine is quintessentially Clausewitzean. And to understand it, we need to return to Carl von Clausewitz, the doyen of modern war, who recognised that war is practically limitless in variety, “complex and changeable,” and noting that every age has its particular kind of war with “its own limiting conditions and its own particular preconceptions.”

Clausewitz’s contemporaneous observations of the character of nineteenth-century warfare are often misinterpreted confusingly as an advocacy of the unchanging nature of war itself. This paradigmatic complacency has engendered the Western narrative of the Ukraine conflict.

Evidently, the Russian side did not conform to the Western narrative. The ensuing bewilderment threatens to fragment western unity. Not all NATO countries are anymore speaking in one voice.

The US President Joe Biden and Britain’s Boris Johnson vow that they will be satisfied with nothing less than a Russian defeat. The New Europeans — Poland and the Baltic States principally — also demand an apocalyptic end to Russia’s history. Somewhat aloof stands Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz who merely says he doesn’t want Russia to “win.” France’s Emmanuel Macron keeps saying that without engaging Russia, European security architecture cannot be built. Then, there are outright sceptics like Greece, Turkey and Hungary.
Biden and Johnson have the upper hand since they manipulate the current set-up in Kiev and leverage the war. But even these two hardened politicians seem to realise lately that things are more complicated. The Joint Vision Statement issued in Washington yesterday following the US-ASEAN special summit completely eschews the usual American rhetoric and hyperbole over Russian “aggression.”
It omits any references to Russia or the Western sanctions and instead underlines “the importance of an immediate cessation of hostilities and creating an enabling environment for peaceful resolution.” (See my blog Indo-Pacific strategy adrift in an illusion.)
Nonetheless, incredible as it may seem, the fact remains that the US Congress is offering Biden a massive war budget to help Ukraine, which exceeds the state department’s annual budget and is more than what he proposes to spend on green energy projects in the US.

Equally, the EU, which imposed such harsh sanctions on Russia, are realising belatedly that the sanctions are hurting European economies more than the Russian economy. In some European countries, the annual rate of inflation is approaching 20%, while prices in the eurozone increased by over 11%, on average. During a videoconference in Moscow on Thursday, President Putin highlighted that:

• Russian companies are steadily replacing Western partners who left due to sanctions;
• 130 million tonnes of grain expected in Russia’s harvest this year, including 87 million tonnes of wheat — “an all-time high in Russian history”;
• Inflation rates in Russia have fallen several-fold on March levels;
• Budget surplus have reached 2.7 trillion rubles;
• There has been a record-breaking foreign trade surplus;
• The ruble is posting “better results than all other foreign currencies” since early 2022.

Critical voices are heard lately that anti-Russia sanctions are only exacerbating the US inflation crisis, and that prioritising aid to Ukraine is distracting Biden from more important domestic issues. Senator Rand Paul has demanded auditing of the gravy train to Ukraine, citing the analogy of Afghan war. He noted that the latest spending package will bring total US aid to Ukraine to $60 billion since the conflict began in February, which is nearly as much as Russia earmarks annually for its entire defence budget!

Yet, Russia has no timeline for this war. It is taking its own time to systematically destroy Ukraine’s military capabilities, industrial base and infrastructure comprehensively. Biden and Johnson thought attrition would set in, as Russia is fighting the “collective West,” after all.

But Putin reminded them on Thursday that Russia won World War II “not only by fighting on the frontlines, but also because of its economic might. At the time, it [Russia] had to confront not only Germany’s industrial potential, but Europe as a whole, enslaved as it was by the Nazis.” Putin deliberately shot off a stark reminder that will resonate in Europe.
An EU consensus on oil embargo against Russia already seems elusive. Twenty European companies have so far complied with Moscow’s end-May deadline to make payments for gas purchases in ruble currency. And they include Germany, Europe’s powerhouse.
The EU’s top executives, Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, two ardent Atlanticists and hardcore Russophobes, pushed the envelope too far. Will EU unity survive these cracks? Scholz’s call to Putin Friday, which reopened a line of communication after several weeks, needs to be understood against this backdrop. Interestingly, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin also spoke with his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoigu on Friday — their first conversation since Russian operations began in February.

Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that the time may be approaching to revisit the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. The closure of all Russian pipelines passing through Poland and Ukraine’s pipeline shutdown leaves Germany tantalisingly close to electricity shortage interrupting industrial production. (here and here)
Bloomberg reports, citing data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that despite Western sanctions, Russia’s oil export revenue jumped some 50% in 2022. Russian shipments have increased by some 620,000 barrels per day in April, returning to their pre-sanctions average. Due to increased demand, more shipments were directed toward Asia. Ironically, the EU, despite the executive’s hardline stance, has so far remained the largest market for Russian fuel with 43% of the country’s oil exports going to the bloc in April, the IEA estimated.

Paradigms, to be relevant, must accurately reflect the reality. When that is no longer possible, the paradigms must be replaced, or the leaderships that rely upon them will inevitably fail. Politicians like Biden and Johnson are used to thinking in terms of a Westphalian world, and are taking time to come to terms with anomalies in the existing paradigm when new powerful trends are dramatically altering the concept of war.

Karl Marx called it the “annihilation of space by time.” The phenomenon of regional conflict has become extinct, and localised violence has global implications thanks to advancement of transportation and communication and technologies. The paradigm-shifting present period is caused by a military-industrial revolution, which makes it a period of sharp, discontinuous change where existing military regimes are being upended by new more dominant ones, leaving old ways of warfare behind.
One would have thought that on a Clausewitzian battlefield, ancient armies arrayed against one another would fire and manoeuver according to the commander’s directions. But in Ukraine, by contrast, these have been replaced with ambient forms of physical and nonphysical violence—sniping, lethal drones, hypersonic missiles, electronic attack, spoofing, disinformation on the other and so on.

Russia is practising a warfare that the West is not used to — where wars aren’t won anymore.

It is highly unlikely that there will be a ceremonial occasion bringing the Ukraine war to an end."

https://www.indianpunchline.com/why-...as-no-winners/

Originally Posted by OhOh

You missed the, "He urged not to forget the Kosovo precedent", reference, you may be alarmed that, historically, it was others who initiated such modifications.

A search for Kosovo may suggest you need to eat some:

You ought to just STFU, because all you talk is fucking rubbish.
I'm surprised this isn't in your drivel thread where it belongs.

Originally Posted by OhOh

Russia expects grain harvest of 130 million tonnes of grain, including 87 million tonnes of wheat – “an all-time high in Russian history,” says President Vladimir Putin, Moscow, May 12, 2022

The c u n t is lying again, unless he counts what he's stealing from Ukraine as "harvest".

Let's hope the cancer gets him soon.

Oh dear this might hurt Puffy more than the cancer.

Sweden is set to follow Finland in applying to join Nato after the country’s ruling Social Democrats party announced on Sunday it was dropping its long-standing opposition to membership of the bloc.

Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson said a formal application to join the military alliance could be made within days, in light of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

At a news conference, she said Sweden would be in a “very vulnerable” position if it did not join, adding: “We believe Sweden needs the formal security guarantees that come with membership in Nato.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2079580.html

“Why Ukraine war has no winners“


​Even OhOh finally accepts that Russia and Putin cannot win this “war”.

My, mustn't Puffy feel stoopid today.

On Sunday afternoon, President Sauli Niinistö and Prime Minister Sanna Marin (SDP) announced that Finland will seek to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato).

Niinistö formally made the announcement in Finnish, Swedish and English, saying that Finland was entering a new era.

"This is a historic day," said the head of state, noting that he had begun the day by visiting the graves of war dead on Finnish Memorial Day.

"These decisions will strengthen, not weaken, our security," said Marin.

It's official: Finland to apply for Nato membership | News | Yle Uutiset

And...

A few hours later, Sweden’s Social Democrats said they had jettisoned their previous opposition to Nato membership, with Moscow’s onslaught on Ukraine looking set to usher in the very expansion of Nato Vladimir Putin claimed he wanted to prevent.

“The best thing for the security of Sweden and the Swedish people is to join Nato,” the prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, told a news conference. “We believe Sweden needs the formal security guarantees that come with membership in Nato.”

She said non-alignment had served Sweden well but “will not do so in the future”. Sweden would be “vulnerable” as the only country in the Baltic region outside Nato, she said, adding that Stockholm hoped to submit a joint application with Helsinki.

Finland and Sweden confirm intention to join Nato | Finland | The Guardian

Yet again Russia helps other countries band together . . . what a fucking idiotic place, now and historically

Dollar falls below 62 rubles on Moscow Exchange first time since January 2020

19 May, 16:27

By 12:01 Moscow time, the dollar fell by 2.45%, the euro fell by 3.07%

MOSCOW, May 19. /TASS/.

"The dollar fell below 62 rubles on the Moscow Exchange for the first time since January 2020.

As of 11:48 Moscow time, the dollar fell by 2.31% to 61.98 rubles. By 12:01 Moscow time, the dollar accelerated its decline to 61.89 rubles (-2.45%). The euro fell to 64.65 rubles (-3.07%).

At the same time, the MOEX index lost 0.54% and reached 2,432.13 points. The RTS index rose by 2.07% to 1,237.61 points."

https://tass.com/economy/1453137


18 May, 22:41

Azovstal fighters tell about treatment they receive in hospital after surrender

All soldiers have received medical aid and have been provided with water and food

MOSCOW, May 18. /TASS/.

"Russia’s Defense Ministry has released a video showing the hospital in Novoazovsk, where captive Ukrainian soldiers, who surrendered at the besieged Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, are undergoing medical treatment.

"I’m being treated OK. I’m not being subjected to any physical or psychological violence," Viktor Shaposhnikov, a member of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, is saying, adding that his injured leg has been examined.

The video is showing hospital wards with captive soldiers. They all have received medical aid and have been provided with water and food, the soldiers are saying.

"The conditions and attitudes are excellent. I have no complaints," Daniil Zhuchenko, who was injured in his leg, is saying. "I’m receiving assistance, medical aid, and having a rest. They said, after six months of rehabilitation I’ll be OK.".

https://tass.com/defense/1452851